THE Donald Trump will be the first today former president in United States history who faces the criminal courts as a trial begins in New York that makes his duel with Joe Biden in the November election more unpredictable.

The Republican billionaire is due to appear today at 09:30 (local time, 16:30 Greek time) before a Manhattan court in a case involving payments to buy the silence of former porn star Stormy Daniels, days before the presidential election. 2016 election that made him the 45th president of the United States.

A little more than three years after he left the White House in chaos, Trump theoretically faces up to four years in prison. That would not prevent him from running in the Nov. 5 presidential election, in which he dreams of rematching Joe Biden, but it would put the campaign in an entirely unprecedented situation.

If he is found not guilty, it will instead be a major victory for the Republican candidate.

“Very High Stakes”

“The stakes are very high because Trump and his lawyers have so far managed to slow down the other trials” in which he is accused of illegally trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his illegal handling of classified documents, he points out in Agence France-Presse Carl Tobias, Professor of Law at the University of Richmond.

Thus the case of Stormy Daniels, which is characterized as fragile by experts, “may be the only one that will be heard before the election”, he adds.

Until the last days, the lawyers they multiplied appeals in vain to delay the trial. On Saturday night, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump appeared once again as a victim of judicial and political persecution.

“Our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never, ever let them take yours,” he told his followers.

He assured that he will testify at the trial.

The Manhattan courthouse will be under very tight security. Demonstrations for and against Trump are expected, as are media cameras from around the world. However, the hearings will not be televised.

First stop today is the selection of the twelve jurors who will unanimously declare Donald Trump “guilty” or “not guilty,” a process that could take days.

At least a hundred Manhattanites will be in the courtroom, where they will have to answer a lengthy questionnaire about their political affiliations and whether or not they like Donald Trump.

130,000 dollars

The billionaire is accused of falsifying 34 accounting documents of his business, the Trump Organization, with the aim of hiding, under the designation “legal fees”, payments made in the last stretch of the 2016 presidential race to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels.

Against $130,000, the latter had agreed to remain silent about a sexual relationship she had with the billionaire Republican ten years earlier, when he was already married to Melania Trump. Donald Trump has always denied the relationship and his defense intends to show that the payments were private.

But prosecutors led by U.S. Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been elected on the Democratic ballot, want to show fraud was committed to withhold information from voters days before the presidential election, which the Republican narrowly won over Hillary Clinton. .

One of the stakes of the trial will be determining whether Donald Trump knew about these payments when they were made. His former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who had given the money to Stormy Daniels – as his boss had asked him to, he assures – and has already been sentenced by federal justice in this case, will be one of the important prosecution witnesses.

The defense intends to hammer the particular witness, who has become a sworn enemy of Donald Trump and has already been convicted of lying to Congress.